Indian flying foxWIKIPEDIA, FRITZ GELLER-GRIMMUnfamiliar viruses, such as the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, are hopping into humans from other mammals at an increasing rate. Each new emergence forces researchers into a reactive race, as they try to identify, study, and corral the new viral threats before they can trigger a pandemic.
Now, sick of being caught on the backfoot, one team of scientists is spearheading a new approach to dealing with emerging diseases. The researchers want to catalog every single mammalian virus in the world, before they have a chance to spread to humans. “We need to know how many unknown viruses there are to understand how much of a threat there is,” says study co-leader Peter Daszak from EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit conservation organization based on New York. “No one’s been able to do this before.”
Daszak’s team began by counting all the viruses in a single species, the Indian flying fox. Then, they extrapolated to include all 5,500 mammals, estimating that these animals harbor at least 320,000 viruses waiting to be discovered. The figure, ...
